U.S. Naval Historical CenterGraduates of the Waves naval training program in the Bronx in 1943.

Q.

I was born in Brooklyn in 1941 and have vivid memories of the war far beyond what one would expect from someone so young — I take that as evidence of how deeply involved New York City was in the war.

I remember Navy aircraft with folded wings parked in the streets (along with tanks) at the armory across the street from the original Loehmann’s; the ships tending the submarine nets in Gravesend Bay in front of Fort Hamilton (and the ships in war paint at the Bush Terminal); fighters at Floyd Bennett Field, rationing, kids’ scrap drives, A stamps on car windshields, gold star pennants and the day everyone on the block was excited about a photo spread in the newspaper showing troops wading ashore (I assume they were D-Day photos).

I recently found a color photo on the Web of the commissioning of the aircraft carrier Franklin Roosevelt and I was there that bright day in 1945 — both my father and grandfather worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

To this day, whenever I’m at what is now the ghost of the Navy Yard I remember the bustle of the workshops, the uniforms and flags and the sound of military bands.— Michael S

My father worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war. How many people were employed, and how many ships were produced there?— Barry B.

A.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard played an important role in the war effort, launching the battleships North Carolina, Iowa and Missouri (site of Japan’s surrender), the aircraft carriers Bennington, Bon Homme Richard, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kearsarge and landing craft that could carry tanks for beach assaults and inland warfare. And more than 5,000 Allied ships damaged by bombs and torpedoes limped into the yard for repairs.

The yard had a wartime workforce of 75,000, including women — formerly confined to sewing jobs there — who were hired for skilled and difficult craft work, as welders and shipfitters.

By the way, “Rosie the Riveter” was very much a part of New York’s war effort. In February 1944, the federal War Production Board reported that 134,000 women were employed in New York City’s 341 major war plants, nearly 28 percent of the workforce.

For all the vital work at the wartime Navy Yard, there was, of course, malingering. Arthur Miller, who spent part of the war as a workman there, wrote in his memoir “Timebends” how one workman snoozed in a cruiser’s engine room as an alternative to showing up for his shift, only to find upon awakening that his ship had gone to sea. As Miller told it: “He did not return to his Red Hook crap game for six weeks.”

Q.

According to my family mythology, my great-grandmother was an air raid warden in Brooklyn during World War II. Can you talk about what her responsibilities were?— as

A.

Some 400,000 New Yorkers, about 80 percent of them men, volunteered at varying times to be air-raid wardens. Their job was to make sure that people headed to shelters or whatever indoor spots were available and that lights were doused at homes and businesses during drills.

In addition, thousands of volunteers, mostly men, served at hundreds of observation points — usually rooftops — to scan the skies for planes that were not clearly identifiable as commercial aircraft. If they saw a suspicious plane, they telephoned its whereabouts to “plotters,” most of them women, who used long pointers to place markers on large tables indicating the planes’ whereabouts. The Army was to send fighters aloft to check out aircraft that hadn’t been accounted for.

In the war’s first months, the wardens had no gas masks. Many had no armbands or helmets, and air-raid sirens had yet to be procured. And New Yorkers being, well, New Yorkers, when one of the first blackout drills was held, in April 1942, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia crowed how people “stayed in off the streets, even the children,” only to learn that Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine had told reporters that a huge crowd milled around in the theater district, ignoring the wardens and gawking at the moon.

Q.

How was Yorkville, a k a Germantown, regarded during this time? I had an uncle who lived on the Upper East Side around then, and he was convinced there were German spies there.— Mike

My dad’s uncle was a policeman in New York City before and during World War II. His uncle was a World War I veteran of the Army.

He and my dad and others would go over to the German neighborhoods and Bund bars in Yorkville pre-1941, start loud conversations insulting Hitler, and then just as a fight was about to commence, pull out badges and guns and ask if there was a problem.

Can you talk about the Bund-Nazi presence in New York City before and during WWII? Thanks!— Jarhead

A.

The German-American Bund, which harangued for the Nazi cause and spewed anti-Semitism in the years leading up to American involvement in the war, had its headquarters at 178 East 85th Street in Yorkville. Headed by Fritz Kuhn, a German-born chemist who entered the United States in the late 1920s, it gained a lot of attention with a February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden and was believed to have had several thousand members, most from the New York metropolitan area. It essentially disbanded with Kuhn’s conviction for embezzling money from the membership and with the coming of war with Germany. It was not an arm of German espionage.

At the war’s end, the Hollywood movie “The House on 92nd Street” dramatized the F.B.I.’s cracking of a Nazi spy ring in Yorkville.

But all this must be differentiated from the German-American support for the war effort and the sacrifices of that community in combat. In November 1940, voters in Yorkville rejected an anti-Semitic candidate named Joe McWilliams in the Republican Congressional primary. And when the United States went to war, the Steuben Society of America, a leading German-American organization, issued a statement pledging the loyalty of its members and declaring “Our country, first, last and all the time.”

Q.

New York was ringed with coastal defense fortifications like Forts Lafayette, Hamilton, Wadsworth, Tilden and Totten. Did any of them ever fire a shot in anger during the war, even by mistake? How about the city’s air defenses?— Pat Lyons

A.

As you note, the New York City area was ringed by forts, their big guns ready to defend the harbor against shelling by U-boats. I’m not aware of those guns being fired during the war, but there were several mishaps involving small anti-aircraft batteries at various spots in the city.

In March 1942, a seven-inch shell struck the 37th floor of the Equitable Building in the Wall Street area. Excited callers to newspapers wondered whether it was a German attack. But a no-doubt sheepish Army officer at an anti-aircraft battery along the East River phoned the police to report that eight shells had accidentally discharged from his outpost. Seven shells fell into the river, but the eighth one — causing only minor damage, with no injuries — created some short-lived panic.

In 1944, the Grymes Hill and Ward Hill residential neighborhoods on Staten Island came under a 50-shell barrage when an anti-aircraft gun on a freighter anchored in the Upper Bay, two miles away, accidentally discharged. Again, no one was hurt.

In October 1943, an Army Air Forces pilot named Jack Watson “buzzed” Yankee Stadium, barely clearing the third-deck roof in his four-engine Flying Fortress, during the opening game of the World Series between the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals.

The Bombers wearing pinstripes that day went on to a 4-2 victory, but Mayor La Guardia fumed over the stunt. The following July, that pilot was in the news again, having brought his crippled bomber safely back to a British airstrip. La Guardia cabled him, “All is forgiven.”

Q.

Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College) was used during the war as a Waves training center by the Navy. There’s a photo in the National Archives of a special subway train taking the women from their swearing-in at City Hall to the Bronx. I have a number of questions. How was Hunter chosen? Were regular classes held at the same time? How many of the women who trained there came from New York City? Last, was there any interaction between the training center and the surrounding community and city after the swearing-in? Thank you.— Bruce

A.

More than 80,000 Waves (pioneering members of the women’s Navy), along with several thousand female Marines and women recruited by the Coast Guard, known as Spars, received their preliminary training during the war at the Hunter College campus in the Bronx, which was informally renamed the U.S.S. Hunter. The Hunter students had been transferred to the college’s building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The recruits lived in nearby apartment buildings, whose residents were forced to move by the Navy, and they drilled outdoors or at the Kingsbridge National Guard Armory.

For all the anonymity of “boot camp,” one trainee stood out. She was from Waterloo, Iowa, and her name was Genevieve Sullivan. In November 1942, her brothers George, Francis, Joseph, Madison and Albert died off Guadalcanal in the torpedoing of the destroyer Juneau (which had been commissioned at the Brooklyn Navy Yard). The deaths of the Sullivan brothers was the heaviest loss suffered by a single family in American naval history, a tragedy that stirred the nation.

The deaths of the Sullivan brothers led to a change in Navy policy — brothers could no longer serve on the same ship. (I don’t know if this was a general military rule.)
The deaths of multiple brothers was the basis for the story of Saving Private Ryan.

USS Juneau was a cruiser, not a destroyer. During WW II, cruisers (light or heavy) had the names of cities; destroyers carried the names of individuals – until they named one for the Sullivan brothers.

The article refers to the ship that the doomed Sullivan brothers served on as the “destroyer Juneau”. Actually that ship was an anti-aircraft cruiser armed with 16 five inch guns plus a whole bunch of smaller caliber weapons to protect the fleet from Japanese warplanes.

I used to live in the Jerome Park neighborhood adjacent to Hunter College and the Kingsbridge Armory.

One reader asks whether the large guns facing the new York harbor were ever fired. They certainly were fired for practice off the beach of Sea Gate where I grew up. Sea Gate had a major military presence during the war. My mother and other Sea Gate women residents worked in a canteen handling food for servicemen. My friends and I collected shells on the Sea Gate beach. We used get as close as we could to watch and hear the firing practice, and I placed my fingers in my ears because of the enormous noise from the guns. I have vivid memories of collections for anything to help the military. We gave a pair of binoculars and lots of pots and pans. I collected abandoned cigarette packs, took out the aluminum foil, rolled the aluminum into balls and took them to school where they were collected. I recall the large searchlights at night to spot and identify planes and the top half of headlights of all cars were painted black to dim the lights from above. As kids we were fascinated by the daily stories of the war told by teenagers on our streets who followed the progress of the war.

One frightening memory of a seven-year-old: I went to the Sea Gate beech in 1942 with my father (who was past draft age), and he was rudely confronted for having a camera on the beach; and it was taken away from him. I always remembered the sign after that: No cameras.

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